


Choosing to Continue

by sanctum_c



Series: Clerith Week 2017 [2]
Category: Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark Souls (Video Game) Fusion, Dark Souls II - Freeform, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:34:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27442015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanctum_c/pseuds/sanctum_c
Summary: Aeris rests beside the latest bonfire and reflects.
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough/Cloud Strife
Series: Clerith Week 2017 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2001052
Kudos: 1





	Choosing to Continue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt 'bonfire'

Aeris settled beside the bonfire, too tired to care about anything but resting. Her sword thudded into the dusty ground nearby. No matter; she would deal with it later, damaged blade or no. Her back ached, her arms ached, her legs hurt more than anything. Immediate relief was right there in her pouch courtesy of her collection of effigies. No. Too rare a resource to waste on a whim; she could cope with the pain and her withered skin for now. Her limbs were still strong. All she needed was a moment to rest before moving on.

How many times now had she sat beside a fire just like this one, stared into similar flames and tried vainly to remember? Back to the before; a time when she was not caught in an endless chain of rebirths, back to her distant past. Both time and the darksign on her shoulder had robbed her of so much. By implication she - and the other Undead - must have lived a normal life once. Or at least something that she might still consider normal contrasted with her present.

Aeris took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She needed to think of something. Best not to dwell on the very recent past; the route she took to reach this bonfire. How, after ascending to the pinnacle of the windmill, she entered a lift that carried her still further up. Up and up to an impossible height and an impossible place; this fortress of black iron and lava.

Focus. Sometimes she could catch fragments of before in the depths of her mind. The moments preceding her arrival in Majula, before her fall from the ancient gateway of Drangelic. She had striven for this place, walked through the driving rain and journeyed under the blistering sun. A time when the weather could still touch her. Quite different from her current emptiness; an Undead nearing the limit of sentience and feeling so little. Leaving the fireside would allow her body to grow chill once more, but it was not cold in the same way. Remarkable that she could remember a time when external temperature affected her and yet the specific memories of rain or sun on her skin eluded her.

There were two memories she turned to more than any other, even as they seemed poised to agonizingly slip away forever. The first was a hazy memory of a figure in a wooden shack somewhere. The figure's hunched form and strained voice predicted Aeris's journey to this kingdom, foretold the slow rot of her thought processes. Aeris had come here, drawn inexorably as much as she might have once resisted. She would likely have rejected the words of prophecy spoken back and taken every route but the one leading her here to no avail. In the end the pull had been too strong; it must have been. She was here.

The second memory was little more than a fragment seemingly somehow resistant to the dissolution that claimed her past, a single moment still close to coherent and clear; a room. The room was important. Or perhaps not so much the room, but its contents. So hard to tell now. A sensation of sunlight outside, rays of light filtering in around the edges of shutters. A figure; not the hunched form of the prophetic woman, but someone else. Someone significant. Not an Undead, not a Hollow. Someone human.

The thought always brought her close to amusement. How far back did her memory reach to somehow involve a living human like that? Their name lost, though she might easily have never known it at all. The figure might have had blond hair and a sorrowful expression. The image felt right despite its existence on the limit of Aeris's memory. Try as she might she could not focus any harder or extract even a sliver more detail of that room and that figure. The more she tried, the more her memories melted away and left her nothing but frustrating shadows cast by an unreachable truth.

If she carried on, if she focused too hard then her memories began to overlap; her arrival in Majula merged with the the boat crossing the shallow lake. Was that the splintery planks of a row boat or the bark of the tree covered in fireflies beneath her hands? Aeris stopped and opened her eyes. A few more moments and then she would need to move on. The quest remained and that seemed all she had left; seek the king. How long had she been striving for that quest? Another impossibility; time was as moldable and resistant to interrogation as the land itself.

Those she met here were often as ignorant as she about a life before arriving in his kingdom and even their own personal reasons to have sought out this place. Some mentioned a kind of savior in the distant past, someone had once and might again save the world. Always the same figure and always the same action; time after time. The thought came to her in the moments Aeris felt she understood the world, when she could cope with whatever an enemy might throw at her. The moment when perseverance paid off and the often impossibly lumbering hulk of a huge opponent fell to one of her sword blows and lay dead at her feet. In those moments, Aeris could begin to believe that the rumors might somehow be about her. And if she was so important than there must be other records of her past, her former life; some idea of who that figure in the room had been. A spark of hope; the chance she might learn lost truths.

But those moments were often nearly eclipsed by the rest of her existence and only served to demonstrate how wrong she was to even dream of such a thing. How could she be a prophecised hero when she failed over and over again? Strike at an enemy with all her might and she more often than not died as claws, blades, teeth and worse hit her with speeds almost beyond her reflexes. Something would always catch her in the end, send her tumbling first to the ground and then into darkness before she awoke beside the last bonfire she rested at. And in those moments she had no choice but to get to her feet and make her way back to that same enemy to try all over again.

Most of the time it would make no difference and the sequence would repeat almost identically. Eventually - or at least it seemed since she had succeeded each time so far - she would be victorious and could advance a little further on her journey. It was not as if she had much choice; strive to advance or remain beside the fire until the last vestiges of her consciousness slipped away and she became Hollow. When that happened she would lose even the bonfire.

Would it be so bad? To die and be reborn like the others in this land? No grand mission, no objective. All she would do - be able to do - was sense life and seek to extinguish it. No. No, she could not do that. Would not do that; it was not her way to simply wait for the end to claim her. She might not be the hero of old; she might not be the savior of the world, but she could and would do whatever she still could.

But was that the trap? Was she so different to the Hollows even now? Struggling to her feet time and time again to seek out an enemy to eliminate? Yes. It was a mantra invoked so often now. Something to keep herself going. She was no Hollow; she remained Undead and with enough sense to alter her tactics as circumstances required. Time to get moving. Aeris pushed herself up and heaved the sword onto her shoulder. Unlike a Hollow she had chosen to keep on trying, chosen to keep on pushing forward. No Hollow acted as the Undead did. No other Undead acted as Aeris did. She would continue.


End file.
